Cream Cheese: An American Tale

By Michael La Corte

These tenements weren’t just rundown, they were also small and, prior to the 1901 Tenement House Act, often poorly ventilated and lit. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

On a sweltering day in the summer of 2019, I visited the Tenement Museum in New York City’s Lower East Side. While there, I was captivated by wooden boxes that I saw in one of the re-creations of a living room space. The boxes were labeled “cream cheese” and were said to have been government-provided assistance for the residents of the tenements in the late 1800s and early 1900s, part of what would became a state aid program.

When I contacted the museum, though, the response was not what I expected, which led me down the cream cheese rabbit hole. Through this research, the connectivity and familiarity of cream cheese stayed with me, along with its iconic stature throughout the Lower East Side and the world at large.

The Lower East Side Tenements

In Tenement: Immigrant Life on the Lower East Side, Raymond Bial details the neighborhood’s centrality for various immigrant groups in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In the 1880s alone, 60,000 Jewish immigrants streamed into rundown tenements on the Lower East Side, he writes. These tenements weren’t just rundown, they were also small and, prior to the 1901 Tenement House Act, often poorly ventilated and lit.

Lawrence J. Epstein’s book At the Edge of a Dream: The Story of Jewish Immigrants on New York’s Lower East Side, 1880-1920 lists the standard foods consumed by the tenement residents of the era:

“[P]ickled herring, pickles, potatoes, smoked fish, lokshen kugel, red cabbage soup, fruit in season, tsimmes from grated carrots, and potato latkes with applesauce,” as well as sometimes chicken, matzo brei, bialys and bagels. Other foods eaten by the immigrants of the time were “knishes, pastries filled with cheese, mashed potatoes, buckwheat groats, or chopped liver.”

This, of course, was not the case for all. Some tenement residents subsided on mostly bread, unpurified water and sometimes a dairy product like cheese or butter.

With immigrants from different places in close proximity, so many foods, cultures and communities were crossing and interacting for the first time, especially within the delicatessen.

“Polish salamis, Romanian pastrami, Russian knishes, and German frankfurters…none of them had ever met before,” author Jane Ziegelman said at a 2010 Beard on Books event, which Devra Ferst reported on for Forward.

But none of these foods are cream cheese. I was eager to learn more about when that became a staple and how it was received.

The History of Cream Cheese

After my visit to the Tenement Museum, as I was absorbing everything I had learned, I reached out to inquire about those wooden crates with “cream cheese” scrawled across them. David Favaloro, the senior director of curatorial affairs and Hebrew Technical Institute research fellow at the Tenement Museum, replied.

“Regarding home relief and the food that was provided—in most cases, this appears to have been regular cheese rather than cream cheese,” he writes. “But for some reason, the wooden boxes available on the ‘antique’ market tend to be for cream cheese, so that what was available when the Museum recreated the apartment exhibit. The primary source for the Baldizzi story [about a mother giving all of her children a roll with cream cheese for breakfast] the memories of their daughter, Josephine, who grew up at 97 Orchard Street. She remembers receiving cheese in wooden boxes from home relief during the Great Depression and the family who used them as flower boxes once the cheese was finished.”

In a 2021 Forward article, “Why the Story of Cream Cheese is the Story of Jews in America,” Andrew Lawrence writes that cream cheese’s original inventor was an “Upstate New York gentile named William Lawrence.”

In the early 1900s, Jewish brothers and Lithuanian immigrants Isaac and Joseph Bregstein began making cream cheese in Brooklyn. Their Breakstone’s brand is still alive.

Shortly thereafter, cream cheese (specifically Philadelphia brand) became a go-to pairing with smoked salmon and bagels, and the rest is history. At its core, cream cheese is an endlessly versatile product. Creamy and soft with a unique plasticity, it is used in both savory cooking and desserts with equal measure, in addition to being an always reliable and consistent spread. It also has an incredible unique history.

In the early 1900s, Jewish brothers and Lithuanian immigrants Isaac and Joseph Bregstein began making cream cheese in Brooklyn. Photo by RODNAE Productions.

Bridging Cultures, the Kitsch Era and Modernity

One prime example of the pure reach of cream cheese is crab rangoon. Taste Atlas notes that crab rangoon’s origins are contested: Some believe it was invented at California’s Trader Vic’s Bar, while others claim it was invented for the 1904 World Fair.

Atlas Obscura refers to crab rangoon as a food that “has a Burmese name, is served in a theoretically Chinese restaurant, and its main component was invented in New York in the late 19th century.”

That article notes that crab rangoon’s popularity began back in the 1940s due to returning veterans who were enamored of the culture of the Pacific Islands—what soon became known as a tiki aesthetic. Many restaurants that opened at the time served American Chinese food in a setting decorated with tropical flowers, naval paraphernalia and facsimiles of Māori statues. Rangoon was actually the largest city in Burma (now Yangon, Myanmar), and it clearly influenced the naming of the new dish.

Additionally, the “American cheesecake” was soon adapted (it is thought that the first cheesecake originated in Greece, probably made with a product like ricotta), which skyrocketed cream cheese’s popularity nationally. In the early to mid-1900s, it was often featured in women's magazines in order to increase sales of cream cheese. An award at the 1929 World’s Fair, cemented the dessert’s place in the canon of American foods.

In fact, in the mid-1900s, cream cheese became a staple in myriad recipes meant to appeal to ease and convenience without any particular ethnic or immigrant ties. By the 1950s, it became an American staple, showing up in myriad recipes that run the gamut from cheese balls and cream cheese-stuffed celery sticks to concoctions like "old fashioned frozen fruit salad.” Soon after, cream cheese became commonplace in dips and dishes such as stuffed chicken or mushrooms.

While cream cheese’s place in the tenement buildings may be apocryphal, it is unquestionably a deeply American ingredient with a far-reaching influence and importance throughout multiple cultures. What may have begun as a modest spread in upstate New York has become a widely recognizable, super-familiar ingredient in the American grocery lexicon. A quintessentially New York creation, cream cheese has since proliferated throughout the timeline and geography of the U.S., touching disparate cuisines and cultures and feeding millions.